LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS

CONTENTS
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WHAT IS LEARNING ORGANIZATION?
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MAIN ACTIVITIES AT LEARNING ORGANIZATION
NEED OR IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING ORGANIZATION CHARACTERISTICS OF A LEARNING ORGANIZATION BARRIERS TO LEARNING
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WHAT IS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION?
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Learning organizations are those that have in place systems. that are used to continually enhance their capabilities and those who work with it or for it.for themselves and the communities in which they participate. to achieve sustainable objectives . The important points to note about this definition are that learning organizations:  Are adaptive to their external environment  Continually enhance their capability to change/adapt  Develop collective as well as individual learning  Use the results of learning to achieve better results
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. mechanisms and processes.

MAIN ACTIVITIES AT LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS
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Learning organizations have to accomplish five main activities:
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Systematic Problem Solving Experimentation With New Approaches Learning From Their Own Experience And Past History Learning From The Experiences And Best Practices Of Others Transferring Knowledge Quickly And Efficiently Throughout The Organization
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Need Or Importance of Learning organizations
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Maintaining levels of innovation and remaining competitive Improving quality of outputs at all levels Having the knowledge to better link resources to customer needs Being better placed to respond to external pressures Improving corporate image by becoming more people orientated .
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Personal mastery: Personal mastery is the commitment by an individual to the process of learning There is a competitive advantage for an organization whose workforce can learn quicker than the workforce of other organizations
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. This is a conceptual framework that allows people to study businesses as bounded objects.Characteristics of a Learning Organization
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Systematic thinking: The idea of the Learning Organization originally developed from a body of work called systems thinking.

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Team learning: Team learning is the accumulation of individual learning.  Shared vision: The development of a shared vision is important in incentivizing the workforce to learn as it creates a common identity that can provide focus and energy for learning
. The benefit of sharing individual learning is that employees grow more quickly and the problem solving capacity of the organization is improved through better access to knowledge and expertise.

Additionally. personal mastery can be seen as a threat to the organization.Barriers to Learning
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Organisational barriers to learning:
Some organizations can find it hard to embrace personal mastery because as a concept it is intangible and the benefits cannot be quantified. This threat can be real. that “to empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive”
. as Singe points out.

The same people who feel threatened by change are likely to have closed mind sets are not willing to embrace engagement with mental models
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Individual barriers to learning: Resistance to learning can occur within a Learning Organization if there is not sufficient buy in at an individual level. This is often encountered by people who feel threatened by change or believe that they have the most to lose.